March 24, 2015

here are three kinds of people in every church. Pioneers, Settlers and Mavericks.

Depending on which point of its life cycle your church is in, these three will interact in different ways that can either benefit your church or threaten to tear it apart.

One of the primary tasks of a church leader (usually the pastor) is to utilize the gifts of all three, while keeping them in balance.

First, some definitions:

Pioneers are those who want to go where no one has gone before. These are the church planters and ministry starters.

Settlers are the people who keep a healthy church humming along. They form your tithing base, your teaching core and your administrative backbone.

Mavericks often feel like Pioneers, but they differ in one significant respect. They don’t start new things, they change old things. While Settlers comfort the disturbed, Mavericks disturb the comfortable.

A healthy church needs all three types of people. But each serves in a different way at different stages of your church’s life. Depending on what stage your church is in, different types of people will predominate in leading, supporting, or being at risk of leaving.

Strong leaders learn to distinguish between these stages so they can guide and utilize everyone and their gifts properly at each stage.